Many other users are now complaining about this – even posting pictures of the red marks on their wrists left by “Mac the Knife.” One guy’s wrists are so marked up by his, he’s proposing a new name for these laptops: Emobooks.

Several others report using sandpaper or a file TO SAND DOWN THE EDGES OF THEIR LAPTOPS. Let me repeat that: People are SANDING DOWN THEIR LAPTOPS because they’re too painful to use.

The iBooks that preceded this new model had rounded edges. My beloved IBM Thinkpad (may it R.I.P.) had rounded edges. So do all the other laptops I’ve since been eyeing enviously in coffee shops and elsewhere. So why did Apple let such dopey design out of the factory?

When I called Apple to ask, the pleasant young man handling the call relayed messages back and forth between Apple’s engineers and me. Their version, according to him, was that this was a “user issue.” Clearly, they said, I wasn’t using the laptop ergonomically.

Hey, I know from ergonomics, but the fact is that the MacBook’s edge is uncomfortable even if you’re just resting your hand by the trackpad or the sides of the keyboard, as you might want to do while pausing to think of what to type next. It also hurts when you pick up an open laptop with both hands to move it.

Readers of this blog know I was all primed to come over to The Light Side and enthusiastically embrace the superior technology of Macs that I’d been hearing about for years from my Macarized friends. But who knew the embrace would be so painful?

Meanwhile, check out the photo of this kludgy solution — slitting a piece of plastic tubing and fitting it over the offending edges.

Since Apple won’t take back its lemon, anybody out there have a better workaround that doesn’t involve taking 300-grit sandpaper to a $1500+ computer, or wearing garden gloves or sweat bands to the coffee shop, or schlepping around some contraption that defeats the purpose of having a light, portable computer? (And yeah, I’ve read about the iLap, but I’m not yet sold on having to carry something like that around during all my peregrinations.)